( cross-posted at a blog of my own )
This October 7th will mark a full ten years of United States involvement in Afghanistan. Already beaten is the previous record for longest modern involvement in Afghanistan held by the Soviet Union (9 years, 50 days), and at present the conflict continues to look like one with no discernible end in sight. With the cost of 2,269 coalition soldier lives (1,413 American), as many as 34,000 Afghan civilians, and more than 383 billion dollars later the war still has no discernible goal, end, or organized plan to get troops out of harm’s way.
While starting two years before the U.S.-led war in Iraq, the Afghanistan campaign found itself relegated to the back-burner for most of the last decade, mainly because the Afghanistan war was seen as the “just war” – we actually had reason to be there instead of Iraq. Most of the anti-war movements and protests throughout the 2000′s centered around this idea – choosing to target Iraq first and Afghanistan second.
Drawdowns to U.S. involvement in Iraq would eventually come, and that combined with a change in leadership in the White House seemed to satisfy a large portion of the anti-war movement – or at least the parts of the movement that did all the fund raising, organizing, and managed to get the media attention (however scarce and mocking, at times). The general feeling with the start of the Obama administration in 2009 was "Iraq is winding down. Let’s finish up this whole Afghan thing, get out, and be on with our day."
The anti-war movement fell silent, and bodies kept coming home in coffins.
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